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14 April 1990

DOUBTLESS Georges Seurat, the French painter who pioneered pointillism,
would have been impressed with this, an image built up out of individual
atoms. Physicists at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California,
wrote their company’s name, magnified here 4 million times, in atoms of
xenon.

Donald Eigler and Erhard Schweizer built up the letters with a special
scanning tunnelling microscope isolated from vibrations and contamination
that would otherwise have interfered with the motion of the atoms. The instrument
can not only resolve changes as small as 0.002 angstroms (around two billionths
the diameter of a human hair) in the apparent shape of the atoms, it can
also move the atoms about.